The Thrill of the Thaw
by scullyseviltwin
Summary: A beginning, a middle and an end. No spoilers.


* * *

There was a flickering in her eyes, kind of like how fluorescent lights looked after you've been awake for forty-eight hours. Everything hummed, shivered.

Everything.

Anything with energy had vibrations, the coffee in her hands didn't ripple against the cardboard of the cup; it licked and sang and vibrated and she swore she could feel it against the individual whorls of her fingertips. Static pulled at the corners of her eyes as her field of vision went a strange blue-black that made her brain ache. The edges of her eyesight frayed until a pinprick of light would pierce her field of vision and time would slow and then speed up again as the world came back to her.

It had been, in fact, forty-eight hours since she had managed to sleep; not a terrible sensation, but something that made her body yearn for something-not sleep-but perhaps for something that would keep her awake and going. Sara teetered on the precipice between needing sleep and abhorring it, fearing that she would never wake again. Fear of her pillow, of her sheets, of the terrible tether of comforter and nightmares.

The demons that came to her in sleep weren't as severe as the demons she saw everyday, living right in front of her. The things that crept into her head during slumber were vague shapes and sounds that stayed with her until her body shook her awake, several hours later. The worst of them had tapered off, leaving her with ghosts of ghosts, slender, slippery ideas that-though they didn't frighten her to wakefulness-they stayed with her during the hours that her eyes were open.

Sara pressed her back against the wall behind her and allowed the cool-blue chill to shiver its way into her body; the cold always kept her alert, but at the present, it seemed to do nothing but freeze her bones in place. Head back against the pane of glass that separated the hallways from the waiting area at the Las Vegas Police Department, Sara attempted in vain to unstick both herself and the time that seemed to be keeping everything dark and stationary. Sliding her eyes closed and sucking in an enormous breath that she swore forced the fabric of her soul to stretch, she made an attempt, but nothing came of it.

Her hands were one her coffee, between her knees, and though she wanted to sip from her beverage, there was no energy to signal this need to her nerves. Another sigh, shiver and Sara felt as though she was sinking into the floor. No matter really, she had nowhere better to be. As she was fathoming whether she should bother to lick her lips or not, there was a shift in the static around her; she felt another presence enter her tiny section of the atmosphere and suck some away for himself. "Brass said there's nothing left for us to sign."

She couldn't even bring herself about to crack an eye and look at him. "I took care of everything else," he continued, a fraction of the painful-lethargy that she felt cutting through the cadence of his voice. The thing that was really funny, what was really amusing to her addled mind, was the fact that the case they had closed was a run-of-the-mill B&E. No murder, no one victimized, save for an overly-wealthy stripper who was now missing half of her collection of Tiffany's trinkets. A buxom blonde crying over meaningless treasure and they were both bone-weary from it.

If the timing had been different and she hadn't felt like her skin was about to slip backwards and switch in for out, Sara might have risked glancing over at him, tried to catch his eye, tried to spark a tiny something. But all she could see in her mind at that moment was white nothingness from the cotton on her pillow casing and the white-blue that the sky tended to scheme in the Southwest.

Hallucinating, she had to be.

"I'm tired." It bubbled out of her throat effortlessly, without thought, but there was no presence of mind to restrain the words from being spoken.

Before it happened, before anything happened, the cold that had wrapped itself around her skeleton-the ice and snow that had substituted for blood for those few seconds-thawed to a sluice of warmth, all before he took her hand, as though her body had anticipated it from him. "I can tell." Flippant, good.

There was an absurdity to the moment, as sort of deja vu that left her wondering if she was being particularly weak or stupid or careless in that instant. To have him touch her in such a public place, what sort of spectacularly insane thing had she done? The coffee was still in her hands-cold too, cold, cold and black-and she hadn't spilled. And she distinctly remembered scrawling her name, messily but correctly across all of the appropriate forms. Nothing wrong, she had done nothing wrong.

Perhaps she had managed to shift the space-time continuum with her musings, but she couldn't muse upon it because his palm was wrapped around her fingers and squeezing, distracting her. Always distracting, distracting.

A crackle and a sizzle and she knew that delirium was just about to settle in, but there was nothing she could do to halt it. Hopes came forth, wishes that she wished sometimes in the darkness of her bedroom, on the edge between dream and sleep.

She wished that something about that moment, when they had met, that it had been different, that some element had been slightly off. That she hadn't been wearing the shirt she had, that he hadn't changed the second slide to the third when he had, that second, the fraction of a second... the moment, if any moment had been different. Maybe then they wouldn't have met, and maybe then she wouldn't have felt so betrothed...

Maybe nothing. Her lids, head, arms, body, soul was heavy and she felt the need to cry at the sheer irrationality of the situation; she couldn't stop thinking in slow motion, but her mind wouldn't slow down. "I'm... tired," she breathed again and he squeezed a little harder as Brass passed by and said his goodnight and paid them no mind.

Like clockwork, or something more smooth with less, less, less noise, his head fell back against the pane and hers slid down onto his shoulder, as though gravity was playing their odds.

It didn't feel comfortable against his shoulder, it felt hard and awkward but right in ways that were much too complicated to place, not in her state. But the shelf of bone that she was leaning on was his and that seemed to be enough to sate her, just a little. And for a moment, she felt like a candle, getting the first delicious burst of flame, craving it and settling in to a casual burn, feeding life from it. How delirious she was, thinking she was living there, against his shoulder...

But it felt nice, so she stayed with him holding her hand, squeezing, squeezing, cradling it until she thought she had had her fill and thought that it would be prudent to steal away home and hide the moment in the place that she hid most of the memories-the memories of him-she cared to carry. "You're tired," not a question, a statement really, something that sounded kept, the statement sounded kept, as though he said it so the words and the moment could be his.

There was nothing for her to say, just a hum and an attempt at a nod. A weak thing, the bob of her head against the warm cotton of his shirt. The delirium, that concrete trap of nauseous-sleeplessness, didn't allow her to say anything else. Almost as though she was drunk, Sara twisted her head and looked at him, catching a glimpse of his eyelashes from the vantage point beneath his chin. "I can't drive," her tone was stubborn and sad and regretful, and perhaps she really didn't want him driving her home but her mouth couldn't make words work and all she could feel was the slightly sweaty grip that was still encasing her hand.

He trotted her out of the building and around the metal-chrome labyrinth of cars to his vehicle and helped her inside with a hand on her elbow, a hand on her back, lowering her into the seat that few had sat before.

And Grissom's voice, the voice that had never changed over the years and won't change still, called her sweetheart and told her that she'd be in bed, soon. For Sara-for her part-listening was enough and she couldn't catalogue it, the way the voice dipped down at the end and became just a slight bit more tender. There was no point, the way her lids were pulling down and her legs wanted nothing more than to be drawn up into her body.


End file.
